Bloch reviews Lukács

I just read an old piece, Ernst Bloch's review of Lukács' History and Class Consciousness from 1923. No great surprises here, yet it's still an amusing read. Bloch saves his criticism for the last few pages. The review zooms in on the dialectical “now” when the subject freely assumes the future by creating it. According to Bloch, Lukács's social categories - which are "sociologically homogenizing" and miss the "polyrhythmic" character of history (p.618) - cannot do justice to this "now". By limiting himself to a merely social dialectics, Lukács is forced to adopt an ascetic "agnosticism" towards everything transcendent. Yet history is "not just the social acquisition by as yet concealed social humans, but also the artistic, religious, and metaphysical acquisition by the clandestine transcendental humans" (p. 618). All this comes into play in the longing that animates the "now". Lukács misses it, thereby also missing the dimension of the new, the not-yet-conscious. Utopia, in short. Predictable? Perhaps. But quite well argued. And I like Bloch's description of his own brand of Marxism as “the metaphysics of the cosmic interpretation of dreams [die Metaphysik der kosmischen Traumdeutung]” (p. 621)!


Reference

Bloch, Ernst (1969) “Aktualität und Utopie. Zu Lukács’ ’Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein’”, pp. 598-621, in Philosophische Aufsätze zur Objektiven Phantasie. Band 10. Gesamtausgabe der Werke Ernst Bloch in Sechzehn Bänden, Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Lukács's defence of History and Class Consciousness

Following the attacks by Abram Deborin, Laszlo Rudas and others on his History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács penned an angry response sometime in 1925 or 1926. The unfinished manuscript was never published and remained unknown for a long time (Lukács himself apparently never mentioned its existence), until it was discovered in the archive of the Comintern and the Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow. It was published for the first time in Hungarian and German in 1996. The English version, titled A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, was published by Verso in 2000. Below I'll simply refer to it as the "Defence".

History and Class Consciousnessone went on to become one of the foundational, classical texts of so-called Western Marxism, but Lukács himself repudiated it in the mid-1920s as part of kowtowing to party orthodoxy. This kowtowing was no doubt the reason the manuscript for the "Defense" was left unfinished. Aoart from the "Defense", few texts exist where Lukács even mentions History and Class Consciousness. There is the preface he wrote for the book in 1967, but this preface is little but an extensively argued rejection of his own early work, a text where Lukács goes to great lengths to castigate himself for a series of errors he believes he committed in it, including idealism, revolutionary messianism, misunderstanding the concept of alienation and neglecting the dialectics of nature (Lukács 1971a). In contrast to this preface, the "Defence" is truly a defence of History and Class Consciousness. 

What is there, then, of interest in the "Defense"? A noteworthy point concerns the importance of praxis - which Lukács discusses in terms of "moment" and "decision" and which he links to a criticism of the fatalist reliance on "process" (Zizek has a striking interpretation of this in his afteword, which, however, seems to overemphasize the decisionist aspect of Lukács's thought). Here's Lukács's definition of the "moment": 

What is a ‘moment’? A situation whose duration may be longer or shorter, but which is distinguished from the process that leads up to it in that it forces together the essential tendencies of that process, and demands that a decision be taken (Lukács 2000: 55)

This, however, is not pure decisionism, because what matters in such moments is class consciousness (ibid. 56). Another long discussion in the book concerns precisely how class consciousness comes into being. As in History and Class Consciousness, he rejects the "spontaneist" position associated with Rosa Luxemburg. The masses can't be trusted to develop this consciousness by itself. Instead, the party becomes decisive, as the place where class consciousness realizes itself. It's the party that "imputes" the consciousness to the workers (ibid. 71ff).

By far the most interesting part of the book concerns the dialectic of nature. In History and Class Consciousness the general thrust of Lukács's argument was to argue that dialectics essentially involved a relation between subject and object, and thus to deny - against Engels - that dialectics could be extended to the subjectless realm of nature. Spotting the weakness of Lukács's position, his critics accused him of lapsing into "dualism" by separating society from nature. Even today, it's popular among commentators to point to the problems and inconsistencies that arise in Lukács's work because of his refusal to extend dialectic to nature. From a variety of angles, commentators like Vogel (1996), Feenberg (2014), Jay (1984: 116), Foster and Loftus have focused on the following contradiction. If dialectics must halt before nature, doesn't this imply that nature is a realm where non-dialectical methods - e.g. those associated with positivism - are legitimate? But if such methods are legitimate, then how can they also represent an instance of reifying, bourgeois thought, as Lukács claims?

How serious are these accusations? In his 1967 preface, Lukács readily admits to the error of having viewed "Marxism exclusively as a theory of society, as social philosophy, and hence to ignore or repudiate it as a theory of nature" in History and Class Consciousness (Lukács 1971a). This admission is hardly surprising, considering the generally dismissive stance Lukács takes in this preface to his book. One has the feeling, however, that his admission is a bit too facile, that it simplifies matters too much. A more complex and interesting argument is set up in the "Defense" where Lukács puts up much more of a fight to defend his statements in History and Class Consciousness.  

In fact, the position expressed in History and Class Consciousness isn't so simple as Lukács pretends in his preface. The argument that the dialectic doesn't apply to nature is thus modified firstly by the repeted insistence that nature is a "social category" - a claim that suggests that our knowledge of nature is decisively shaped by the historical dialectic shaping society. Secondly, it is also modified by a rather odd, isolated passage where Lukács acknowledges the possibility of an objective dialectic operating in nature independently of humans while stressing that the absence of human consciousness in this dialectics means that it is different from the social dialectics and must be studied in a different way (ibid. 1971b: 207). This is odd since it appears to contradict his emphasis elsewhere on the subject-object relation as central to dialectics.

Turning to the "Defence", Lukács presents a number of arguments related to nature. Firstly, he clarifies that he in History and Class Consciousness had talked “only of knowledge of nature and not nature itself” (ibid. 2000: 97). That is the sense in which nature is a social category. It simply means that there is no socially unmediated relationship of humans to nature. This, he argues, follows from Marx’s thesis that our consciousness (which of course includes our consciousness of nature) is determined by our social being (ibid. 100). That society mediates our knowledge of nature, however, doesn't mean that one has to deny the objective, independent existence of nature. “Self-evidently nature and its laws existed before society” – but from that doesn’t follow that “nature would be knowable without the mediation of these new social dialectical forms” (ibid. 102). He repeats the acknowledgement in History and Class Consciousness that there is an objective dialectics in nature that is independent of humans, but insists that humans are still needed “for thinking the dialectic, for dialectic as knowledge” (ibid. 107). On the whole, then, this first argument amounts to a forceful assertion of the priority of a subject-centred dialectics, not only in the realm of society but also in regard to our knowledge of nature.

The second argument is a continuation of this. Lukács defends his decision in History and Class Consciousness to characterize “as the decisive dialectical categories not transformation of quantity into quality, etc., but rather interaction of subject of object” (ibid. 112). This decison implied a rejection of Engels's material dialectics, which had stressed objective laws such as the transformation quantity and quality rather than praxis. To Lukacs, however, the subject-object relation is central because of the historical situation in which the proletariat rises to transform society. Overlooking this need for transformation leads to eternalizing the categories as in bourgeois immediacy, making the concepts lose all dialectic functionality.

‘Dialectical’ categories that have been severed from this connection can even be used by bourgeois researchers; it is not inconceivable that they might, for example, be able to work with the transformation of quantity into quality. The category becomes properly dialectical only in the context of the dialectical totality (ibid. 113)

This, of course, sounds very much like a defense of the general overall conception of dialectics in History and Class Consciousness. But how about the objection that Lukács in that book fails to clarify whether natural science has a legitimate place or not? Is it compatible with a dialectical approach?

To tackle this question, Lukács introduces an important third argument. While natural science - like all consciousness - is determined by society, it “does indeed adopt a special place in the history of human knowledge” (ibid. 113). It would thus be “false relativism” to dismiss it as a merely bourgeois form of thinking or to treat it “in the same way as the knowledge of nature of past epochs” (ibid. 114). While it was born with capitalism, there is a “factual obstacle” to concretizing how natural science is determined by society. The transformation of science only takes place gradually as the effect of the revolution of the material basis and the course of this transformation cannot be known in advance. This means that even socialism must use natural science in its bourgeois form for the time being since a new science has yet to emerge (ibid. 117). In other words, there mere fact that all knowledge is socially determined doesn't mean that we can transcend the horizon of that knowledge and dismiss it as "relative" or as belonging to a past era that has been overcome by the events of 1917. To jump immediately to a more "dialectical" science would be an illegitimate shortcut.    

The question remains, however, why the natural sciences in particular are so hard to transcend compared to, say, the social sciences. Why is it more legitimate to dismiss the use of non-dialectical methods in the latter? Lukács doesn't provide any clear answer to this question in the "Defence", but a reasonable answer would be that our self-awareness directly affects society in a way that isn't true of nature. We don't really need to transcend the horizon of social science to realize that society can't be fully understood without taking praxis or subjectivity into consideration. The fact that non-dialectical methods can be cogently criticized in an immanent fashion within the field of social science means that there is no need to resort to what Lukács calls "false relativism", e.g. dismissing such methods as "bourgeois" or belonging to a bygone era.
As mentioned, Lukács doesn't spell out this answer explicitly. He does, howeveer, add a brief, fourth argument which suggests that this is indeed how he would have answered it. In the realm of society, our palpable experience of frequent change and of the role of human praxis make it easy for us to realize the limits of trying to understand society through ahistorical, non-dialectical categories. In nature, by contrast, it's possible that certain things are eternal or only change so slowly that they may never be known dialectically:

To what extent all knowledge of nature can ever be transformed into historical knowledge, that is to say, whether there are material actualities in nature that never change their structure, or only over such large periods of time that they do not feature as changes for human knowledge, cannot be raised here (ibid. 118)

This passage suggests that the non-dialectical traits of existing natural science may have to be abandoned one day, provided that we come to the realization that nature is more changing and less ahistorical than we thought. However, Lukács leaves it open whether or not this will ever happen.

Looking back, Lukacs's presents four arguments that can be summarized as follows:

1. Our knowledge of nature is never wholly free of social determinations - implying that even an objectivistic framework for studying nature (e.g. an objectivistic dialectics of nature or natural sciences of the positivistic type) will always be embedded in a social dialectics.
2. A genuinely dialectical method involves a relation between subject and object rather than being merely objective or contemplative. Even if a dialectics of nature is possible, it can't be studied as if it were merely objective. An objectivistic dialectics wouldn't really be different from ordinary, "bourgeois" science.
3. But even if existing and seemingly non-dialectical natural sciences are in reality embedded in a social dialectics, they can't yet be simply replaced by any more overtly dialectical method for studying nature, although this might be possible in the future. This is because we cannot anticipate the future science that may result from revolutionizing the material base. Despite existing forms of natural science having their social roots in capitalism, we are stuck with them for the time being.
4. However, to the extent that nature and its lawlike regularities are subject to change, some form of objective dialectical movement may be taking place in nature. This implies that the methods of non-dialectical natural science will ultimately prove to be insufficient also in the realm of nature. However, we don’t know to what extent such change is happening.

Taken together these arguments do form a kind of defense for, and clarification of, the position Lukács adopts in History and Class Conssciousness. While acknowledging that nature may have its own dialectical laws and that our knowledge of nature is socially mediated, he nevertheless refuses to impose dialectical methods on the study of nature. At least for the time being, the existing non-dialectical methods of natural science are legitimate in relation to nature. At the same time, he holds out the prospect of a different natural science in the future, one that will be self-aware of its own social determination. Before that day comes it won't be possible to discern what in science is tied to bourgeois social formations and what is not. This is admittedly a complex and rather difficult position to defend. But regardless of its strength or weakness, it is much more interesting than the flat capitulation offered in the 1967 preface.

Post-script on Foster

Before ending, I'd like to add a comment on John Bellamy Foster. As I've discussed already (here and here), Foster bases a great part of his criticism of Western Marxism on its restriction of dialectics to the realm of society and praxis. By rejecting Engels's dialectics of nature, he argues, Lukács and other Western Marxists handed over the study of nature to positivism. In his "Defense", however, Lukács anticipates many of the moves Foster makes in order to reconstruct a dialectics of nature. On the one hand, Lukács admits of the possibility of an objective dialectics operating in nature independently of humans (as Foster himself points out). On the other, he also - like Foster - stresses that the act of knowing nature must always involve dialectics.

Considering these similarities, why does Foster criticize Lukács? An important part of the reason is obviously his dissatisfaction with the fact that Lukács, at least for the time being, admits of the legitimacy of an "undialectical" natural science as a tool for studying nature. Another part of the reason is probably that Lukács never really clarifies what he means by the objective dialectics operating in nature. Foster, by contrast, puts considerable effort into developing the idea of such a dialectics and on the basis of that tries to assert a "unity of method" for both society and nature.

In Lukács's "Defense", however, we find a series of objections to precisely the kind of project Foster seems to engage in. As we have seen, Lukács ultimately asserts the primacy of subject-object dialectics as the basis for studying both society and nature. Foster, by contrast, is only partially relying on a subject-object dialectics (e.g. when he argues that capitalism creates a metabolic rift in the relation to nature). In the main, his project is to develop a "subjectless" dialectics operating in nature itself inspired by Epicurus' atomistics and Darwin's theory of evolution.

Foster's problem is that to the extent that he emphasizes the former type of dialectics, his position not all that different from Lukács and Western Marxism and his harsh criticism of them therefore seems unfair. To the extent, however, that he instead emphasizes the latter type of dialectics, he ends up in a position where he will be vulnerable to Lukács's criticism. Firstly, his attempt to sketch a dialectics of nature on the model of Epicurus or Darwin seems to overlook that nature is a social category. Secondly, since this type of dialectics neglects the element of praxis, he seems vulnerable to the criticism that it will be merely contemplative and therefore easily reabsorbed in bourgeois research. Thirdly, such an objectivistic dialectics of nature would have to compete with the existing natural sciences. Its aim seems to be to do precisely what Lukács says is impossible: namely to anticipate the transformed natural science of the future and, on that basis, replace the existing natural sciences. The only alternative to actually competing with them would be to argue that natural science itself has already developed in a way that has made it less positivistic and more dialectical. To some extent, this is precisely what Foster is trying to argue by referring to Darwin and to contemporary biologists (such as Levins, Levontin and Gould) who are sympathetic to Engels's idea of a materialist dialectics. Against this, however, one might object that the overwhelming majority of scientific studies are still more positivistic than dialectical.

If Lukács's arguments hold, Foster is in a fix. Either he has to adopt a subject-object dialectics similar to the Western Marxists he set out to criticize, or else he has to mimick the natural sciences and compete with them on their terms by developing an objectivistic dialectics of nature. I don't really wish to evaluate here to what extent Lukács's claims can be upheld. It should be clear, however, that he is far from defenseless against the kind of criticism that Foster has directed against him. His position may be difficult to defend, but so is Foster's.


References

Feenberg, Andrew (2014) The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, London: Verso.

Jay, Martin (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lukács, Georg (1971a) “Preface to the new edition (1967)”, pp ix – xivii, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London: Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg (1971b) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London: Merlin Press.

Lukács, Georg (2000) A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, London: Verso.

Vogel, Steven (1996) Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Alex Loftus and urban environmentalism

Last week, I finished an interesting book - Alex Loftus' Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology (2012). This is a theoretical book, but Loftus writes like a young activist, desperately hungry for a new and better world. Theoretically, he conjoins the urban political ecology-approach (represented by e.g. Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika and Nikoas Heynen) with the “production of nature”-approach associated with Neil Smith.

Part of what makes this book interesting is that it exemplifies how Smith’s perspective can be developed from being primarily an academic tool into a stance in which theory joins hands with activism. This is quite significant, considering that Foster (2016) has criticized the "production of nature"-approach for its insensitivity to environmental problems. The result of Loftus' intervention is a kind of environmentalist Marxism that is quite distinct, both from today's Eco-Marxism and from older variants of Marxist thinking on nature derived from the Frankfurt School.

But what kind of environmentalism is this? 

Firstly, it is an urban environmentalism. It’s in everyday life as experienced in the urban environment that he finds his foothold – through “reveling in the dirt and grime, the anomie and the creativity: of city life” (Loftus 2012: xiv). As he also puts it: "Within the noise and the dirt, the fumes and the concrete, of the contemporary city, I argue that there are conditions of possibility of sensing this alternative world" (ibid. x).

Secondly, the urban environment is seen as assemblages of social and natural relationships. This means that he rejects the “dualism” between society and nature that is a trait of much environmental thought. Referring approvingly to actor-network theory (ANT), he writes that  “the world is made up of both things and relationships that simply cannot be separated into two boxes labeled ‘nature’ and ‘society’” (ibid. 2).

Thirdly, he rejects the apocalypticism that has long characterized environmentalism (in this, he follows Smith and Swyngedouw, and comes close to what I have described as post-apocalyptic environmentalism). He rejects apocalypticism not because threats to nature aren't real, but because such accounts are disempowering. They feed a sense of powerlessness and “put global futures outside the control of everyday citizens”, and thereby “depoliticise” environmental issues (ibid. xvif).

In all these three respects Loftus comes pretty close to the environmental justice movement (which he he's inspired by; ibid. x) or to what Joan Martinez-Alier (2003) refers to as the "environmentalism of the poor". Characteristic of this form of activism is that it is concerned with livelihood and social justice, rather than with preserving wilderness or "green" government. His inspiration from "justice"-movements is also seen in his choice of struggles around water distribution in Amaoti in Durban as one of his main main examples to visualize and underpin his arguments.

So let's turn to theory. Loftus is inspired by Marx's early writings. Much of the book is taken up with discussions of Lukács, Gramsci and Lefebvre. Along the way we also find briefer discussions of Smith, Eco-Marxism and actor-network theory. I'll briefly go though how he relates to these different theories. Doing so will give us a feel for how he works out and develops a theoretical position of his own.

His point of departure is Neil Smith’s claim in Uneven Development that capitalism produces nature. Loftus fundamentally agrees with this. Yet Smith is also criticized. Firstly, he is said to neglect the importance of the sensuous and embodied ways in which nature is performed. Secondly, he appears to give little sway to nonhuman agency (ibid. xxii, 13f, 27). Despite this criticism, Loftus claims that Smith’s approach shouldn’t be rejected. Instead its dialectical foundations should be deepened (ibid. 16). These remarks indicate the theoretical directions in which Loftus will set out searching for supplement and correct these weaknesses in Smith: we will thus need more on dialectics, the sensuous, and non-human agency.

The main discussion of dialectics comes in his chapter on Lukács. Lukács is appreciated above all for providing a theory of situated practice. Although his idea of the proletariat's unique ability to grasp history in a dialectical way may appear quaint today, it anticipates contemporary standpoint theory. The problem with Lukács lies in his concept of nature. Lukács rejected Engels's attempt to extend the dialectical method to nature. This is problematical since Lukács himself advocates dialectics as the only way to grasp "totality" and break the hold of reificatory bourgeois science. It also seems to go against the grain of his statement (in History and Class Consciousness) that nature is a social category. Despite the fact that Lukács ends up in a self-contradictory position, interpreters like Andrew Feenberg and Martin Jay defend his rejection of Engels as a sound move. Feenberg, for instance, argues that nature, unlike human praxis, constitutes a realm that can be adequately grasped through the "reificatory" methods of natural science (see e.g. Feenberg 1999, 2014). Matters are somewhat thrown into confusion by the fact that Lukács modified his position on nature in later writings (such as his long unpublished defense of History and Class Consciousness and his 1967 preface to a new edition of History and Class Consciousness). Nevertheless, it appears that Lukács could never bring himself to fully extend a dialectical method to the study of nature. Loftus thinks that this is “devastating to his overall argument” (ibid. 64). To fully separate dialectics from nature would “deliver a fatal blow to our efforts to appropriate Lukács for a non-dualistic approach to metropolitan nature” (ibid. 63). The reason? Such a separation fails to confront the reality of "socio-natures" (ibid. 73). However, Loftus argues that Lukács’s difficulties can be overcome by a greater emphasis on how nature is produced through human as well as nonhuman activity (ibid. 66).

Turning to the importance of the sensuous and the everyday, the central theoretician is Lefebvre. However, Lefebvre's own writings on nature are disappointing. He viewed nature as a passive victim of an encroaching society, and he was thus never able to see nature "as an ally". His stance was predicated on a dualism between society and nature that ignored the myriad mixings between the two (ibid. 8, 110). Smith’s signal move, which sets him off from Lefebvre, is precisely to recognize the interpenetration of nature and society, pointing out how capitalism constantly produces nature (ibid. 110ff). Lefebvre's strength, by contrast, lies in his focus on affective and mental conceptions that are missing in Smith, and in his recognition of artistic creation of human praxis. Loftus thus argues that such creative practices can be seen as a model of the sensuous processes through which the production of nature could be carried out (ibid. 113f, 38).

Non-human agency then? Although the direct inspiration seems to be urban political ecology, it is clear that the main, indirect source of this idea is Latour and ANT. The influence manifests itself in Loftus' terminology of "assemblages" and his critique of dualism. Curiously, in certain formulations he comes close to merging dialectics and ANT: Marx, he writes, helps us understand nature in non-dualistic terms, as a dialectical unity in which labour mediates a process in which human and nonhuman are inseparable, or in Latour’s terms form social-natures (ibid. 7). Reading sentences of this kind, it is easy to nod assent to Foster's lumping together of ANT and “the production of nature” (Foster 2016, Foster & Clark 2016). In fairness, however, it should be pointed out that Loftus is careful to stress that the unity of the socio-natural assemblage is dialectical, a relation which he argues that ANT fails to capture. Loftus also concurs with Kirsch and Mitchell in their criticism of ANT: its obvious that nonhuman agency exists but the task is to explain this and thereby to help people regain power over things that have taken on a life of their own (ibid. 73). As Kirsch and Mitchell writes:

But if we are truly to avoid becoming mere "dead theories and dead practices" ourselves, then it remains important that we insistently raise the question that ANT wants so much to forestall: why are "things as such" produced in the ways that they are—and to whose potential benefit? How, to turn Gramsci’s point around, can people struggle to take control of those non-human actors, those things as such, and shape them so that the "nature of things" is really on their side?” (Kirsch & Mitchell 2004: 702)

Ultimately, then, ANT is rejected as insatisfactory since it lacks the emancipatory drive and the rooting in everyday life that Loftus finds in Marxist thinkers.

In this way, Loftus balances his theoretical inspirations against each other, hoping that they will mutually make up for their respective deficiences.

At least as significant as what inspires Loftus is perhaps what doesn't. One might ask how he relates to two other important currents in Marxism that have been as influential as the "production of nature"-approach in theorizing the relation between capitalism and nature: the Frankfurt School and Eco-Marxism. I won't dwell long on the Frankfurt School here. Suffice it to say that Loftus isn't really appreciative of it. He castigated it for its dualism and its incapacitating lament about the "domination of nature". I believe he is unfair in this criticism, and in the future I will try to discuss more at length how a Frankfurt School approach to nature can be made fruitful today (some preliminary reflections can be found here and here).

 

How about the Eco-Marxists then? Clearly there is friction in relation to them. He explicitly criticizes “dualist” perspectives that posit nature “as a force inflicting revenge on the arrogance of human society” (ibid. xvi). Despite Foster’s own rejection of dualism, such an idea of nature as a victim of capitalism that may well some day exact revenge on humanity is surely implicit in Foster's idea of the metabolic rift. Not surprisingly, Loftus criticizes the idea of the rift for its ”vague and atavistic” implications: does Foster really want to return to a society in which the night soil of city-dwellers is used as fertilizer (ibid. 31)? He also criticizes Foster’s “somewhat overstretched claim that Marx was somehow a proto-environmentalist” (ibid. 13). Another difference between Loftus and the Eco-Marxists is Loftus’ stress on sensuousness and artistic practice as a model for the production of nature. Loftus therefore announces that he will “move in somewhat different directions” compared to Eco-Marxists like Foster and Burkett (ibid. 25).

I am less convinced of the centrality of ecological crisis to Marx’s overall understanding of the contradictions of capitalist societies. Nor am I convinced of the overall importance of the theory of ‘metabolic rift’ to a radical politics of contemporary urban environments. Foster’s rediscovery of the roots to Marx’s materialism [in Epicurus] leads to a neglect of key critiques of mechanistic materialism in the writings of Lukács and Gramsci. Even more curious, Foster then condemns these authors as ‘idealist’ and lacking the coevolutionary perspective necessary for a progressive ecological politics. These criticisms are unfounded. (ibid. 25f)

This isn't the place to delve further into this criticism. Let me just state that I agree with the part of it that deals with Foster's "idealist"-accusations (but this again is something I hope to return to it in a future blog post).

Clearly, Loftus finds much less of value in Eco-Marxism than in Lukács, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Smith or Latour. The fact that a theoretical conflict line today seems to run between Eco-Marxism and the "production of nature"-approach is evident also in Foster's harsh and scathing criticism of the latter in recent articles (Foster 2016, Foster & Clark 2016). In these, Foster assimilates the "production of nature"-approach to ANT and refers to both as "monistic" theories. Foster also stresses the superiority of Eco-Marxism as a tool for diagnosing to the damage capitalism causes to nature. By contrast, theoreticians in the enemy camp, like Smith, are insinuated to lack an environmentalist sensitivity or even - like Latour - to have capitulated wholesale to capitalism.

Foster may be right in his criticism of Latour. Whether he is right to condemn the "production of nature"-approach as a whole is more dubious. Having read Loftus, I have a pretty good hunch how he would reply to such criticism. To begin with, he would insist that his approach is as dialectical and as criticial of capitalism as Foster's. In addition, it would be easy for him to demonstrate that his own approach has at least as much affinity to environmental activism as Eco-Marxism. It's quite striking, however, that the kinds of environmentalism to which Loftus and Foster orient themselves are quite different. Foster's Eco-Marxism may be well suited to an environmentalism concerned primarily about damage done to nature. Loftus' position, by contrast, is geared to the environmental justice movement or the "environmentalism of the poor".

Dwelling on the debate between Eco-Marxists and the "production of nature"-approach may seem like a barren exercise. As a reader, one might wonder how meaningful it is to spend attention on these debates, in which theoreticians compete about being the best dialectician while hurling labels like “dualism” and “monism” as abusive invectives at their opponents. However, while reading Loftus, I had the refreshing feeling that theoretical trench warfare was not a prime concern for him. He seemed concerned above all to understand and at least theoretically do justice to the protesting women in Amaoti. In this book he gropes his way forward - picking up one insight from Smith, then another from Lukács, and so on - towards a position more adequate to such protesting women's experience and the alternative world taking shape in their struggles. I wouldn't say that he has solved all theoretical problems. But the road he indicates - seeing humans as part of nature but at the same time viewing this unity as a dialectical one, and basing all of this on everyday experience - deserves to be explored. It may be a way forward, past the trenches, or at least one way forward among others.

Socio-nature?

References

Feenberg, Andrew (1999) “A Fresh Look at Lukács: on Steven Vogel's Against Nature”, Rethinking Marxism, Winter: 84-92.

 

Feenberg, Andrew (2014) The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, London: Verso.

Foster, John Bellamy (2016) “Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left”, International Critical Thought 6(3): 393-421.

Foster, John Bellamy & Clark, Brett (2016) “Marx’s Ecology and the Left”; Monthly Review 68(2) (June);

Kirsch, Scott & Mitchell, Don (2004) “The Nature of Things: Dead Labor, Nonhuman Actors, and the Persistence of Marxism”, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 36(4): 687-705.

Loftus, Alex (2012) Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Martinez-Alier, Joan (2003) The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
 

What is reification? Critical comments on Honneth

According to a popular understanding, reification means treating human beings as things. Reification would in other words be when people are treated in a way that disregards what makes them specifically human - for instance when we instrumentalize them for our own purposes or regard them as mere "cogs in the wheels" of some larger structure or system.

Axel Honneth

However, this conception is at odds with how the concept was used by the generation of social thinkers who introduced it in social thought - thinkers like Lukács, Bloch and Adorno. Contrary to common belief, to them reification had nothing to do with the opposition of“human beings” and “things”. To them reification means that an object, human or not, appears to possess substance independently of the process of its historical mediation. In this sense even the act of identifying a person as “human” in distinction to animals or things could be an instance of reification. Reification, in other words, is not the opposite of the human but of the historical. “For all reification is a forgetting: objects become purely thing-like the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their other aspects: when something of them has been forgotten”, Adorno writes in a letter to Benjamin (Adorno & Benjamin 1999:321). Here, then, reification doesn’t mean just to treat human beings as things. It’s to treat any aspect of the dialectically constituted world as a thing.

The concept of reification was first made widely known through Lukács' History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923. In his usage, the roots linking the concept of reification to Marx' idea of commodity fetishism are clear: just as the commodity appears to possess value in its own right, independently of the process of production, the reified "thing" appears to possess an essence in its own right, regardless of social or historical context. Thus Lukács criticizes "bourgeois thought" - characterized by a stance of putatively neutral, contemplative observation - for its treatment of concepts as rigid and timeless entities independent of history. Through its attempt to grasp things as if they had a fixed ahistorical essence that could be captured through formal categories or definitions, such reifying thought becomes blind to the dialectical movement of history, to the mediation of its objects through the “totality” of societal relations. What he counterposes to such thinking is dialectics, the ability to grasp shifting meanings by relating them to the whole. Controversially, he argued that this ability to grasp the whole was embodied in the proletariat, which he portrayed in Hegelian terms as the identical subject-object of history.

As Axel Honneth notes in his 2005 Tanner Lectures (available as pdf here and also included in his 2006 book Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea), the concept of reification has nowadays fallen out of use. A primary aim of his lectures is to revive it. He does so, however, by tearing it out of the theoretical context in which Lukács developed it. Linking it instead to his own theory of recognition - developed in a series of writings from The Struggle for Recognition (Honneth 1995) onwards - he follows the popular understanding of the concept by opposing it to the human rather than the historical. Rather than seeing it as inherent in capitalism, he redefines it as a "forgetfulness of recognition" not necessarily tied to any particular social formation. On the way he subjects Lukács to a rather patronizing critique. Below I will criticize Honneth's reformulation of the concept. I will not do so, however, by arguing that Lukács was right. Lukács was a problematical thinker whose proclivity to a dogmatic philosophy of history blunted his own best insights. Instead I will point to possibilities inherent in the concept which inspired thinkers like Benjamin and Adorno and which suggest how it can be made useful today.


Honneth's criticism of Lukács

Honneth subjects Lukács to criticism on at least two scores.

To begin with, he objects to the "totalizing" nature of Lukács' critique of reification. Such a critique, according to Honneth, only makes sense when viewed against a more primordial or genuine form of praxis in which humans take up an "engaged attitude" towards the world (Honneth 2005:192). Due to his totalizing critique, however, Lukács is unable to clarify adequately what a human relation not affected by reification would look like. To be sure, Lukács does employ a notion of non-reified life inspired by Hegel and Fichte, according to which view human agency is defined as when mind and world coincide. To Honneth, this view is utterly untenable. A more plausible view of agency is suggested by Lukács in passages where he describes engaged praxis using words like “cooperative”, “empathetic”, or experiencing objects as “qualitatively unique” (ibid. 101).

Honneth argues that what Lukács was aiming at in passages like these is similar to Heidegger's "care" and Dewey's "practical involvement" and to what Honneth himself calls "recognition". Being constitutive of social life, this more caring, existential relationship must precede the attitude of detached contemplation which Lukács associates with a reified view of the world. The former can never be wholly replaced by the latter; at most it can be "forgotten" in the sense of not being paid attention to. Thus reification is "forgetfulness of recognition" rather than its wholesale abolition. To forget is not to unlearn, but a “kind of reduced attentiveness... which causes the fact of recognition to fall into the background” (ibid. 130). Lukács' critique therefore cannot be totalizing, since it implicitly relies on the presence of unreified human behavior that is still present even in capitalism, and which can serve as a yardstick of the critique.

Secondly, Honneth faults Lukács for being unable to explain the causes of reification properly. Lukács saw reification as rooted in commodity exchange, but also extended it to the entirety of capitalist social life. But how can reification occurring outside the sphere of commodity exchange be explained? As Honneth points out, Lukács vacillated between on the one hand claiming that capitalism requires all activities to be assimilated to commodity exchange and on the other arguing along Weberian lines that it is the outcome of general processes of rationalization rather than capitalism per se (ibid. 97, 102). Honneth suggests that this difficulty was noticed by Lukács himself, who reacted to it by shifting direction in his approach. Instead of attending to the reified object he turned to the reifying gaze, arguing that when people take up the role of an exchange partner, which is ubiquitous in capitalism, they become “detached” observers, for whom the social surroundings habitually come to appear as a “second nature”, as mere thing-like givens (ibid. 98f).

But how should the emergence of this attitude be explained? In dealing himself with the question of causes, Honneth states that “we cannot move as directly and immediately to the sociological level of explanation as Lukacs did” (ibid. 130). Instead of moving much at all, however, he merely argues that to discuss causes one should distinguish between two types of reification:

To start with the first case, in the course of our practices we might pursue a goal so energetically and onedimensionally that we stop paying attention to other, possibly more original and important motives and aims. An example of this phenomenon might be the tennis player who, in her ambitious focus on winning, forgets that her opponent is in fact her best friend, for the sake of whom she took up the game in the first place.[...] The second kind of reduced attentiveness that provides a model for explaining how reification is possible derives not from internal but from external factors influencing our actions: a series of thought schemata that influence our practices by leading to a selective interpretation of social facts can significantly reduce our attentiveness for meaningful circumstances in a given situation. (ibid. 130f)

Having gesticulated in this direction, he abruptly drops the discussion of causes. It thus remains unclear what the external factors might be that he mentions.

It is clear that we are dealing here either with institutionalized practices, which cause contemplation and observation to become independent of their roots in recognition, or with socially effective thought schemata, which compel a denial of antecedent recognition. For now, however, I would prefer to leave this point aside. (ibid 131)

It's a pity that Honneth prefers to "leave this point aside", since dealing properly with it would have strengthened his theory. His theory of a struggle for recognition has often been criticized for being divorced from history. The notion of reification might have helped him anchor it better in social context. This, however, would have required him to actually discuss the social forces that have established it as a social pathology. By simply leaving the question of causes aside and describing it as a "forgetfulness" of recognition that can occur when playing tennis, the possibility of reification risks being turned into something close to an anthropological constant. The impression is strengthened that his account is ahistorical, being based on a model of recognition which is unconcerned with the social-historical origins of reification.


What is reification?

Honneth claims that Lukács' critique of reification is totalizing. But is this correct? As Honneth himself observes, a "totalizing" critique is difficult to square with the lukácsian celebration of the proletariat as a liberating subject that functions as a de-reifying force in history. Honneth criticizes Lukács for being inconsistent. A far more reasonable conclusion, however, would be that Lukács' critique isn't really totalizing at all.

The problem with Lukács is not that he fails to identify a model of non-reified praxis, as Honneth claims. The problem is rather that he theorizes the relationship between reified and non-reified realms in a too crude and rigid fashion. By linking up his critique of reification with a class metaphysics tied to a philosophy of history that predicts the victory of the proletariat, he himself succumbs to a reified view of history. Thereby he compromises his own criticism of reification and introduces an ambiguity in his own theory, which makes it amenable to being developed in two fundamentally different directions. On the one hand, the philosophy of history can be emphasized and the critique of reification de-emphasized, a route preparing the way for and adumbrating Lukács' own later turn to Stalinism. On the other hand, the critique of reification can be foregrounded and the philosophy of history jettisoned, which was the route travelled in Western Marxism by Adorno and others who were inspired by Lukács.

Georg Lukács

But how about Honneth's point that a critique of reification, in order to be valid, must take its point of departure in a notion of non-reified human praxis? Isn't this point valid? Not necessarily, if it is taken to imply the need for a theory of such praxis. All that is needed is a theoretical insight into the limits of reification. Such an insight can be grounded in experiences of shock or pain, giving rise to the sensation that "this cannot be all there is" or that "something is missing" (etwas fehlt), as Adorno put it (in Bloch 1988:1ff). What Adorno tried to show through his theory of negative dialectics was precisely the validity of such experiences as an impulse for critique.

Adorno’s negative dialectics dispenses with the Lukácsian notion of “totality”, but an even more significant amendment is his stress on self-preservation as the essential purpose of reified thinking, or “identity-thinking” - i.e. thought that strives to repress or shut out the perception of non-identity and thus the awareness that things can be otherwise, of qualitative change and history. This is significant since it introduces the idea, absent in Lukács, that reified thinking, far from being a stable structure, is constantly under siege by shocks and impulses. Approaching its objects from the standpoint of self-preservation, this sort of thinking cannot but sense the non-identical as a threat.

Adorno thus offers the idea that something in perception itself – namely, the perception of non-identity – offers the possibility of resisting and upsetting reified thinking. Similarly, to Benjamin shock could play the role of a liberating rupture that awakens us to history. This awakening was not only political, but also methodological. One way to understand this is by asking how we may express a viable notion of “reality”. The position of Benjamin or Adorno would be that this reality is history. Not, however, history as an objectified body of facts or of interpretations, but as a force which destroys our expectations. “History”, as Jameson wrote, “is what hurts” (Jameson 1981:102). History, then, is a force which is most keenly felt through its effects but which can never be directly represented. It is what breaks through and invalidates our expectations and the conceptual net by which we struggle to contain it. This means that reality can never be wholly expressed in words. But it can be known. We know it as that which outwits, upsets and defeats our words.

The fact that reality can be felt but not directly represented means that perception is not entirely governed by concepts. To perception belongs not only the categories through which we order reality, but also the failure of these orders in those sudden moments when something occurs and something is perceived which forces us to view reality in a new way. Concepts only correspond imperfectly to the fluid historical processes which we are nevertheless able to apprehend – to that “adventurously moving, latently expectant world” which Bloch called “the most real thing there is” (Bloch 1988:154). The discrepancy between concepts and what they claim to represent is what Adorno calls non-identity. For him non-identity was a central concern precisely for the reason that it is the language by which changes on the material or social level are communicated to the subject. It is the negative way in which consciousness registers the discrepancy between itself and the external world.

Honneth, then, goes wrong when he presumes that a theory of reification must rest on an anthropologically derived yardstick positing care, engaged praxis or mutual recognition as fundamental to social life. Indeed, even to talk of an ahistorical yardstick would be reification. What a theory of reification needs, as an index of wrongness, is simply history: a history that hurts, shocks and undermines identity. Adorno understood that, as did Jameson. Even Lukács did, although he made the mistake of trying to theoretically nail down this "history" by decreeing its subject to be the proletariat, whose praxis was supposed to do away with the reified categories.
 

As Lukács showed, only a thinking that itself does away with reified categories is capable of grasping the role of particular things in the evolving course of history. By reworking dialectics into negative dialectics, Adorno removes some of the reifying parts of Lukács' own theory while at the same time demonstrating the viability of a critique of reification that takes its point of departure in a form of thinking that can still be considered dialectical. Honneth, by contrast, tends to rely on formal, ahistorical categories of human behavior. To make the concept of reification fit into this ahistorical framework, he needs to shrink it. In his hands, it is no longer a concept for criticizing ahistorical essences, but for criticizing a dehumanizing way of treating other people. Although he does discuss the reification of non-human objects briefly, the fact that he redefines reification in terms of his theory of recognition means that his concept of reification is primarily modelled on human relations. As I have already suggested, this misses that to Lukács and others, thingness was not opposed to the "human" so much as to the "historical".


References

Adorno, T. W. & Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
 

Bloch, Ernst (1988) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Honneth, Axel (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Honneth, Axel (2005) Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered University of California, Berkeley, March 14-16, 2005; http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/h/Honneth_2006.pdf (accessed 2014-01-18).

 

Jameson (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Lukács, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, London: Merlin Press. 

Postone's Marxism: Is there a dialectics outside capitalism?

Here are my reflexions on Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993). Just like Michael Heinrich, Postone is a critic of "traditional Marxism", and just like him, he offers a reinterpretation of Marxism that de-emphasizes the revolutionary role of the industrial proletariat. However, the manner in which they carry out their criticism is different. While Heinrich directs attention to the entire valorization process of capital, emphasizing the crucial role of both production and circulation, Postone is much more focused on the notion of labor.

Let me start with what I see as Postone's central claim. To him "traditional Marxism" is a criticism of capitalism from the standpoint of labor. Postone’s Marxism, by contrast, is a critique of labor in capitalism. Since Marx’s theory refers to capitalism, not society in general, labor cannot be a transhistorical category. Instead, it must be understood as an integrated part of capitalism. This means that labor cannot provide a standpoint from which to criticize capitalism, and neither can the proletariat: “the working class is integral to capitalism, rather than the embodiment of its negation” (Postone 1993:17). The struggle, then, should not be a struggle of labor against capital, as traditional Marxists thought, but a struggle against labor seen as an integral part of the valorization of capital.  This conclusion has implications for Postone's understanding of domination in capitalism. Rather than being a matter of class relations, it takes the form of domination by impersonal and quasi-objective mechanisms such as fetishism, in the construction of which labor is deeply implicated.

The benefit of this reinterpretation, according to Postone, is that it shows the usefulness of Marx’s theory not only in a criticism of liberal nineteenth-century capitalism but also in a criticism of contemporary welfare-state capitalism or Soviet-style state-capitalism. The latter forms of capitalism are just as capitalist as the former since they all build on the valorization of capital built on labor. Abolishing private ownership or rearranging the distribution of goods is not enough to escape capitalism.

Postone both builds on and criticizes the approaches of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. There is much in his book that shows his affinities especially to the latter - such as the criticism of welfare state capitalism or the stress on fetishism - but he nevertheless criticizes these earlier thinkers for being bound to a transhistorical conception of labor. Lukács in particular is singled out for heavy criticism since he saw the proletariat as the Subject of history, as capable of grasping totality and hence offering the standpoint of critique. Engaging with the Hegelian legacy in Lukács, Postone arrives at one of his most important and provocative arguments. “Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed exist in capitalism, yet he does not identify it with... the proletariat” (ibid. 75). Instead it is capital that is portrayed as a Hegelian Geist – as a subject and self-moving substance, following its own immanent historical logic. Hegelian dialectics, then, is specific to capitalism and is not a tool for grasping history in general. Thus, to Marx, the "totality" was not the whole in general, and certainly not a standpoint which he affirmed. Instead, he identified totality with the capitalist system and made it the object of his critique: “the historical negation of capitalism would not involve the realization, but the abolition, of the totality”, Postone argues (ibid. 79). The working class cannot lead history towards this negation. In fact, it is only by breaking with the logic consitutive of this totality, in which the working class forms part, that a different, post-capitalist society can be born. “The abolition of the totality would, then, allow for the possible constitution of very different, non-totalizing, forms of the political coordination and regulation of society” (ibid. 79f).

As for the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Postone acknowledges that its shift to the critique of instrumental reason came about since it lost faith in the emancipatory role of labor which Lukács ascribed to it. However, because they failed to grasp labor as specific to capitalism and instead identified labor with human interaction with nature per se, as in Horkheimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, they ended up in a transhistorical concept of labor that blinded them to the contradictory nature of labor as constituted in capitalism, a conception that in turn produced a pessimistic view of capitalism as non-contradictory and one-dimensional. While Habermas tried to remedy the pessimism, he did it only by balancing it against communicative reason, not by reinvestigating the notion of labor.

This is a striking and at first sight very attractive reinterpretation. It updates Marx while remedying some of the problems of subsequent critical theory. By directing attention to the notion of labor, he helps overcome the Frankfurt School's ‘economic deficit’. By delimitating totality to capitalism, he also shows how it is possible to assert with Adorno that "the whole is the false", while still maintaining that lots of opposing forces might exist outside the totality. Finally, the idea of a liberation from labor has a nice ring to it that makes it go down will with many activists today.

Let me now turn to the murkier points in Postone’s interpretation, the points where, in my view, his theory becomes fuzzy and ambiguous.

The first of these ambiguities concerns technology and science. Postone rejects the view, associated with traditional Marxism, that sees industrial production as a neutral, purely technical process that could be salvaged from capitalism and carried on in similar form in socialism (ibid. 9). To criticize capitalism, he argues that we also need to criticize industrial production, or at least the form it has assumed in capitalism. The problem is that he simultaneously argues – based primarily on a famous passage in Grundrisse – that science and technology creates the preconditions for an overcoming of capitalism, since they enable human beings to create unprecedented “material wealth” in a way that relies less and less on human labor. Since in capitalism “value” can only be created by labor, capitalism increasingly comes to be characterized by a contradiction between the processes generating “wealth” and “value”. Unlike “value”, Postone appears to think that “wealth” is a category that it is fine to apply transhistorically. “Wealth” existed in precapitalist societies and must also be imagined as something that can exist in post-capitalist, socialist societies. What happens with capitalism is that the creation of “wealth” can only take place through the production of “value”, i.e. through the exploitation of labor and valorization of capital. However, by showing that “wealth” can be produced in abundance without relying on labor, science and technology open up possibilities of overcoming capitalism (ibid. 24f, 193-200, 232f, 287-291, 309ff, 339, 360). Here Postone portrays science and technology, not as irremediably implicated in capitalism, but as potentially liberating forces that point beyond capitalism. That is of course fine, but the question then becomes how to distinguish the good and bad moments of science and technology. Postone calls for a transformation of not only of “relations of production” but also of the “mode of production”, but without giving us much in the way of explaining how much or how radically the latter needs to be changed.

Another difficulty concerns the difficulty of wholly confining categories, such as labor, to capitalism. Along with Heinrich and others associated with the "new reading of Marx", Postone points out that in the terms of Marx' theory as laid out in Capital, categories such as labor or value only have meaning within capitalism. However, as he himself recognizes, Marx had a transhistorical conception of labor in his early works on alienation and even in a section in Capital (ibid. 230). Sometimes Postone himself uses labor in a transhistorical sense, to talk about labor in precapitalist societies (e.g. ibid. 180). Sometimes he seems to soften his position, not arguing that labor cannot be applied transhistorically, only that it cannot be understood “simply in transhistorical terms” (ibid. 230), which blunts his criticism of traditional Marxism. Is the impression that Marx treats labor solely as an integral part of the valorization process of capital not simply the result of the fact that he in later writings such as Capital opts to concentrate on economics, i.e. on the logic of capital, rather than on the class struggle? Wouldn't a reasonable interpretation be that he still had hopes in the latter, despite not explicitly writing about it very much? Isn't Postone doing a certain violence to Marx when he bases his reinterpretations of Marx' theory almost exclusively on late texts such as Capital?

Thirdly, there is the problem of dialectics. As mentioned, Postone confines Geist and totality to capitalism. This claim has some antecedents in earlier critical theory. Adorno, for instance, claims that the role of Spirit in capitalism is taken by "value": "The objective and ultimately absolute Hegelian spirit [is] the Marxist law of value that comes into force without men being conscious of it" (Adorno 1973:300). The posture of taking up arms against "totality" itself is of course also familiar from older critical theory. Adorno, however, never confined dialectics in toto to capitalism. Although Postone does allow for some forms of dialectical interaction (e.g. people changing their own nature reflexively through acting on nature or the reciprocal constitution of social practice and social structure), he argues that such interaction only becomes “directionally dynamic” in capitalism (Postone 1993:304f). In other words, dialectics in the sense of a historical logic or necessity only exists in capitalism. This raises the question of how capitalism can be overcome. If there is no Geist but capital, then dialectics cannot point the way out of capitalism. Liberation can only mean liberating oneself from dialectics, by creating a world in which it is no longer dominant.

The indication of the historicity of the object, the essential social forms of capitalism, implies the historicity of the critical consciousness that grasps it; the historical overcoming of capitalism would also entail the negation of its dialectical critique. (ibid. 143)

However, sometimes Postone himself seems to grasp the relation between capitalism and its outside dialectically, as when he uses the term “determinate negation” for the movement whereby capitalism is transcended (ibid. 361). But if the overcoming of capitalism is a determinate negation, doesn’t that require the premise of a totality transcending the capitalist system, as Lukács thought?  Sometimes Postone writes as if the totality of capitalism were driven towards its own abolition by its inner contradictions (e.g. ibid. 2009:72). However, apart from the discussion of technology and wealth referred to above, it is hard to see that he specifies anywhere what kind of contraditions might bring about this self-abolition.

So how is resistance supposed to be waged? If the negation of capitalism is not a dialectical movement, then what is it? What action would not be part of the totality? Sometimes Postone talks about new social movements in what seems like a vaguely hopeful way (e.g. ibid. 2004, 2009). But empirical references to such movements are not very helpful as long as he fails to specify how they threaten capitalism. How are they to be distinguished from the postmodern pursuit of difference which he is so critical of? What is the criterion for saying that the labor movement is dialectically integrated in capitalism while the new social movements aren't? If the latter are brought into conflict with capital in a dialectical fashion - through a struggle that mutually constitutes them - would they not risk incorporation into totality just as much as the labor movement? Indeed, looking at the so-called new social movements (environmentalism, second-wave feminism, peace movements etc), many of them are rather institutionalized and at peace with capitalism. If, on the other hand, the experience of commodification and the promise of non-capitalist "wealth" is thought to trigger a non-dialectical struggle against capital then the question is how this leap out of totality should be conceptualized. Should it be thought of along the lines of the autonomia movement's self-valorization of labor and refusal of work? Would Postone not then, like Antonio Negri, end up close to Deleuze and the idea of lines of flight as a model for a new kind of struggle?

I imagine that Postone would reply along the following lines. The proletariat cannot be posited in advance as a subject that will overcome or abolish capitalism. At least as labor, it will always be implicated in capitalism, as an integral part of the valorization process. This, however, does not mean that working class people must be viewed, cynically, as co-opted or corrupted by capital. Capital needs to turn people into labor, to proletarianize them, in order to produce surplus value. People, for their part, are forced to sell their labor power to make a living. What Postone criticizes is that the labor movement has tended to embrace this proletarianization by saying that "labor" must be the standpoint of its struggle. His message is not that working class people are hopelessly corrupt, but that there is no need for them - for us - to identify as "labor" in order to resist. As long as we need to work for a wage, there will always be a part of us that is guilty of supporting capitalism, a part of us that is "labor". But at the same time, we are also more than labor. We have a freedom - sometimes small, sometimes greater - to resist, and when we try to resist in a radical way, trying to reject capitalism as such rather than just gaining concessions, then we also cease to function as "labor".

My disagreement with Postone is in how he portrays this freedom. He chooses to describe the leavetaking of the standpoint of "labor" as a break with dialectics since it is not part of the systemic logic of capitalism. To me, this indicates a rather constricted view of dialectics - a view in which it is almost a caricature, a logic of system-building and nothing more. But dialectics can also be a dialectics of difference, or non-identity as Adorno put it, and as such it is compatible with freedom, and with analyzing not only how capitalism works, but also how it might disintegrate. It could be used to analyze how resistance, in the course of its struggle, might push its opponent in new directions, escape it (at least temporarily), become ensnared with it, stumble, or make the opponent stumble, and perhaps one day even topple it over. 

So what do I take away from my reading? I agree with Postone that it is not enough to abolish private property to get rid of capitalism. However, I still want to hold the door open for using certain categories outside capitalism – something which I think Marx himself was doing in his early writings, before he turned to his work on Capital, which, as Postone correctly argues, is exclusively an analysis of capitalism. Above all, I see no reason to argue that dialectics is only applicable to capitalist societies.


References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics, New York: Continuum.

Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Postone, Moishe (2004) “Critique and Historical Transformation”, Historical Materialism 12(3): 53-72.

Postone, Moishe (2009) History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays, Tokyo: UTCP (The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy).